A former 40 year Atheist analyzes Atheism, without resorting to theism, deism, or fantasy.***If You Don't Value Truth, Then What DO You Value?***If we say that the sane can be coaxed and persuaded to rationality, and we say that rationality presupposes logic, then what can we say of those who actively reject logic?***Atheists have an obligation to give reasons in the form of logic and evidence for rejecting Theist theories.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Finally. Catching On to the AtheoLeftist Victimhood Scam

"Back in April, during one of their GLoP podcasts on Ricochet.com, Jonah Goldberg, Rob Long and John Podhoretz explored the fables of the Rolling Stone rape article, Columbia’s Mattress Girl, and the general tendency of college campuses to be hotbeds of false accusations of rape, racism, and other fever swamp delusions:

PODHORETZ: But it doesn’t have to be everybody; that’s partially, I think Jonah’s point. It can be two people, it can be three people, on a campus of 4,000 or 25,000, or 50,000, who can turn the place upside-down. Somebody paints a swastika on his own door, and the entire place revolved around this fact for an entire week. It is very empowering of dangerously deluded or fallacious behavior.

GOLDBERG: We’re in a weird Nietzschian transition moment where victimhood is the way you assert your will to power.

I found that to be an intriguing concept, given that Nietzsche lit the fuse for so much of the bloodshed of the 20th century in Europe. On this side of the pond, he also empowered much of the “Progressive” and anti-American movement of the first half of the 20th century. On the left, this included Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno of the infamous Frankfurt School, transplanted to America after a rival form of Nietzsche-worshipping socialism won the day in post-Weimar Germany. And (more or less) on the right, famed journalist H.L. Mencken, who was the first to translate Nietzsche in English in 1907 and whose later polemics are chockablock full of Nietzsche-inspired attacks on traditional American culture, democracy and religion. (Including, in a much more benign form Ayn Rand — whatever her later protestations, Objectivism shares a lot in common with Nietzsche’s Will to Power. And eventually Stanley Kubrick; it’s no coincidence that 2001: A Space Odyssey’s central leitmotif is Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra.)

Partially as a result of Nietzsche’s influence, think of the polar opposites that the American student is taught throughout his young life: with all of the self-esteem and “you can change the world!” rhetoric pumped into his psyche since kindergarten, by the time he gets into college, today’s student is caught between believing on the one hand, he’s the second coming of the Nietzschian Superman (no relation to famed journalist Clark Kent). And on the other, with all of the left’s obsessions with the notion that everyone is a victim, he’s concurrently Nietzsche’s Last Man, “who makes everything small” — micro, you might say, as in an obsession with “micro-aggressions.”"

But it is not just "on-campus", it is the entirety of the programs of the Left, which views everything human through the prismatic lens of Class - Victims, Oppressors, and themselves as the Messiah Class.

If/When I Go Missing Again

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"This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it."Thomas Jefferson, dedicating the University of Virginia

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Compendium of Rational Principles

Most people claim to be rational. But few have any idea of what that entails. Here is a list of articles that discuss the principles of logic, rational thought and related topics, such as evidence, truth and wisdom: